For people without qualifications in minimum wage jobs, a civil service job is a pay rise with way better terms. But skilled people are walking because they are underpaid. So the public sector is quickly filling up with people who don't know what they are doing.
The other problem is the government wants to run public services like a business. But a business isn't a service. It's for making a profit, but public services can't make a profit.
This is the core issue with public sector. They don't "make money" so the public get pissy when people in these positions are paid anything close to market rate for skilled workers. They then adapt to this and pay people less, get less qualified people and then, shocked pikachu face, those people aren't as good and when you are talking budgets of hundreds of millions, a hundred thousand on someone brilliant at their job is chump change.
My partner works for the NHS and at one point was travelling all over the country by train for work. She wasn't allowed to book anything but cattle class tickets due to the optics despite first class being cheaper if you booked in advance and allowing her to work on the train.
A friend of mine worked for the BBC years ago and he was unlucky enough to be at the heart of the papers picking up on the fact he was travelling via first class on the train because he could get food, a guaranteed seat where he could work for 2 hours each way for less than the cheapest ticket along with buying a meal at his destination. Its all about the optics. Not the actual reality of it.
As to running public services like a business, there is absolutely zero issues with that. The idea isn't to make money from fundamentally unprofitable areas, the idea is that you make decisions that are best for the future of the service. You don't penny pinch this year and pay for it twice over next year. You don't skimp on staffing costs if they will more than pay for themselves in other ways.
Christ, the NHS is paying my partner a high salary and she still get awful IT equipment, a single monitor most of the time (2 crappy, different resolution ones when she is lucky) and does way too much low level admin because they can't afford to hire someone else to do it. They probably lost about 50% of her productivity to penny pinching. IT equipment savings have got to be the most ridiculous. Having 2 large monitors would pay for themselves in a few weeks for most people and yet there they sit with a single 17" monitor in some cases.
